Simply Moving

With the right tool and a bit of artistic talent, you can create two-dimensional cartoons, even without Flash. In this article, we present four animation programs and look at how well they perform in practice.

Despite blockbusters such as Toy Story and Shrek, conventional cartoons still have countless fans, with growing audiences for budding cartoonists and animation hobbyists. In the analog age, the artist had to take up a pencil and draw an entire picture over and over for succeeding frames.

Flip books functioned according to the same scheme: One second of story required 30 hand-drawn images. Even if the protagonist only moved a hand, the cartoonist had to conjure up the image on paper a number of times to achieve smooth animation. In the digital age, it’s a lot easier to accomplish.

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